Author: rssmasher

Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.

From the stump speeches of Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard to the role of ad tech in funding misleading content to YouTube’s multiple ad scandals, the perils of digital media buying were on full display throughout 2017. Here are five charts that summarize the state of brand safety.

Brands claim responsibility
Whether you’re examining brand safety, fraud or data leakage, there’s plenty of blame to go around the complex ad-supply chain whenever a snafu arises. But brands have more to lose than others if their ads appear next to questionable content.

A survey of 30 brand marketers by Digiday+ showed that brands place more responsibility on themselves than on agencies, vendors or publishers, when it comes to maintaining brand safety. Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.

YouTube’s brand pullouts
In March, brands like AT&T and Verizon took their ads off YouTube after The Times of London published an exposé that showed brand ads appearing in videos that promoted terrorism. Although most of the brands that pulled their ads from YouTube were back on the platform within a few months, posturing surrounding this event catapulted brand safety into elite buzzword territory.

The concept of brand safety has been around for years, but as seen in the Google Trends graph below, searches for brand safety peaked in March.

Violent content is widespread
From drugs to piracy to sex, there is a lot of content on the internet that advertisers try to distance themselves from. Violence is the category that ad-verification company Integral Ad Science blocks, most often for brand-safety reasons, for its advertiser clients.

Travis Lusk, vp of global sales strategy at IAS, said advertisers aren’t necessarily more sensitive to violence in content than they are to sex content or illegal downloads. Compared to other touchy topics, there just happens to be more content across the web that gets categorized as violent.

Brand-safety tactics
In November, video ad platform Teads surveyed 100 CMOs and vps at large brands about brand safety. Nearly 80 percent of them said they are more concerned about brand safety than ever before.

About half of the survey respondents said they had reviewed their agency and vendor contracts over the past year. More than a third said they layered on more third-party ad measurement to their campaigns.

“Marketers are stepping up to take control over the way their money is spent,” said Forrester analyst Susan Bidel.

Programmatic perils
IAS found that across display and video for both mobile and desktop, programmatic buys have a greater likelihood of exposing brands to unsafe content than direct buys. This makes sense, given that with direct deals, brands know who they are working with. Programmatic platforms, on the other hand, are engineered to bring ads to thousands of publishers simultaneously, and the long-tail sites featured on these platforms offer cheap scale at the price of appearing next to low-quality or sensational content.

As Pritchard noted in a recent interview with Digiday: “We’ve still got to do work on brand safety.”

[Read More …]

Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

SoftBank and Mubadala are in the round.

Chinese ride-hail behemoth Didi Chuxing just raised $4 billion, the company announced on Wednesday. Before this round, the company had raised upward of $15 billion.

Participants in this round included SoftBank and Mubadala. Didi would not disclose the current total funding. This round valued the company at around $56 billion; the company most recently was valued at $50 billion.

After Didi acquired Uber’s China operations in August of 2016, it expanded its international footprint through investments in companies like Brazil’s 99.

The company expects to continue that expansion. Part of the funding will also be dedicated to the development of AI, according to the announcement. Earlier this year, the company launched an AI lab in the U.S. to focus on the platform as well as self-driving.

Didi also has dipped its toe in dockless biking by participating in a recent $700 million round investment in Ofo, which recently expanded into the U.S.

This is developing …

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[Read More …]

Facebook operates on a truly unprecedented scale. Managing such incredible amounts of data and traffic requires unconventional thinking and coming up with lightning fast solutions in real time. Our work is as bold as it is fast and impacts billions of people every day.

Facebook operates on a truly unprecedented scale. Managing such incredible amounts of data and traffic requires unconventional thinking and coming up with lightning fast solutions in real time. Our work is as bold as it is fast and impacts billions of people every day.

Given all the constant late-night POTUS tweet storms and the unstoppable #metoo movement, this hasn’t been the easiest year for a company to try to break through the noise and try to get noticed in a big way.

There have, however, been a few incredible exceptions. Obviously, everybody knows about the unorthodox launch of Apple’s iPhone X (including the insane semi-accidental animoje karaoke videos gone viral). State Street’s awesome traffic-stopping Fearless Girl statue was clearly huge, creating returns for the bank worth $7.4m (despite the fact that the brand ended up with egg on its face some months later). And everybody loved Tesla’s surprise launch of the record-breaking Roadster after the grand finale of the Tesla Semi launch.

“The ingredients of a good stunt are that it fits with what is happening in the culture today,” Richard Laermer of RLM PR explained. “It has to fit the times. It can’t be something so obscure that no one will get it. It has to really hit people where they live. And most important, a good stunt is something people will tell others about without rolling their eyes.”

Here are a few other bold PR stunts in 2017 that you might have missed but that drew millions of eyeballs and captured our collective imagination.

The Jumping Robot video (Boston Dynamics)

Who doesn’t love a jumping, backflipping robot that’s gone viral on YouTube? We love Boston Dynamic’s jumping robot, posted on November 16, 2017. It’s already racked up a whopping 12m views. The robot is positioning the ex-Google brand as the go-to B2B brand for delivering humanoids that can walk (and scare the living hell out of you).

What are 12m views on YouTube worth to your investors and to your brand?

The Gyroscopic Transportation of the Future video

Semendov Dahir Kurmanbievich launched the Futuristic Gyroscopic Transportation and captured our imagination on social media for at least 48 hours. This company racked up 5.4m views on YouTube in just a few days to show the futurist’s concept for a transportation vehicle that can pass above traffic.

“The key to standing out is showing what your impact can be in context – whether that context be your competitors, your industry or other relevant companies,” said Nitzan Tamara, vice president, marketing at market intelligence company SimilarWeb. “The lack of context limits your ability to show what your growth and impact really means. If you want to get noticed and make an impact, show the full picture you operate within.”

Gusto – “The Cross Country Roadtrip”

While it’s way too easy in Silicon Valley to live in your own Northern California hot tub bubble, you’re never going to connect with the rest of the world unless you get on the road and shake hands with the heartland on a ‘listening tour.’ While other tech CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have made promotional tours or roadshows to middle America, in April Gusto chief executive and co-founder Josh Reeves drove a Winnebago from San Francisco to Jacksonville, stopping at 11 cities along the way (more than 3,000 miles).

The trip received local coverage in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Alabama and increased its web traffic by 30%. The business raised $161.1m in funding, backed by investors including Instagram, Stripe, Yelp, Dropbox, and Eventbrite, and is now valued at over $1bn.

Cancun.com – “Seeking a Cancun Experience Officer”

The company set out to find the right candidate to spread the Cancun love and drive traffic to the newly-relaunched Cancun.com. The company behind the stunt (though they tell me it’s more than just a stunt) is TravelPass Group, a travel technology company based in Lehi, Utah that is part owner of Cancun.com.

The posted chief experience officer, or CEO, position pays $10,000 a month for the candidate to live and experience Cancun for 6-months expense free. The CEO will be expected to create content based on their experiences that will be used on Cancun.com. TravelPass and BestDay launched the job search in early November, resulting in more than 350 articles and over 100 broadcast segments, plus 4,000 applications and counting. To apply you have to make a one-minute video.

The best part is the job requirements:

• Sleeping in luxurious beds overlooking the most pristine beaches
• Scaling 3,000-year-old pyramids followed by a swim with a 40,000-pound whale shark
• Sipping an ice-cold beverage before teeing off 200 yards down an ocean fairway
• Mingling with locals and tourists at your VIP table in the hottest clubs
• Coordinating charitable projects with local organizations to support education, health and well-being
• Having the most enviable job on the planet

Interested? There’s still time to apply. Join the more than 4,500 applicants (and counting) from more than 100 countries who have already done so.

Winners will be announced in January.

Screenshop

I love how @screenshopit lets you find the exact designer looks you see people wearing online, plus suggests similar items at all price points! #ScreenShop_Ambassador https://t.co/TXZ23agVoT pic.twitter.com/nA8JBDVbU5

— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) November 7, 2017

Perhaps the best stunt of all is getting one of the biggest brand influencers of all time, Kim Kardashian, to become an early adopter and advisor of your new mobile app. The New York-based app is known as the Shazam for clothing.

“If you don’t have Kim Kardashian’s digits at your fingertips, thanks to the rise of user friendly platforms like FameBit and Tribe, influencer marketing strategy is more easily implementable than ever before,” said Nate Masteron, a marketing expert at Maple Holistics.

Bitcoin (Unnamed)

It wouldn’t be a 2017 tech story unless there was a mention of Bitcoin. Sources tell me there is a Bitcoin stunt in the works as we speak. A crypto-credit-card company is branding a physical token with its logo on it and going down to Wall Street with an army of Task Rabbits to hand them out to Wall Street executives at lunchtime.

According to the PR agency I spoke to, “Wall Street will hate this so much because they have a strong distaste for ICOs.”

The agency will be filming their reaction for a video that is expected to get a huge amount of media pickup. I guess we’ll see, and no, this isn’t part of a PR stunt.

[Read More …]

Given all the constant late-night POTUS tweet storms and the unstoppable #metoo movement, this hasn’t been the easiest year for a company to try to break through the noise and try to get noticed in a big way.

There have, however, been a few incredible exceptions. Obviously, everybody knows about the unorthodox launch of Apple’s iPhone X (including the insane semi-accidental animoje karaoke videos gone viral). State Street’s awesome traffic-stopping Fearless Girl statue was clearly huge, creating returns for the bank worth $7.4m (despite the fact that the brand ended up with egg on its face some months later). And everybody loved Tesla’s surprise launch of the record-breaking Roadster after the grand finale of the Tesla Semi launch.

“The ingredients of a good stunt are that it fits with what is happening in the culture today,” Richard Laermer of RLM PR explained. “It has to fit the times. It can’t be something so obscure that no one will get it. It has to really hit people where they live. And most important, a good stunt is something people will tell others about without rolling their eyes.”

Here are a few other bold PR stunts in 2017 that you might have missed but that drew millions of eyeballs and captured our collective imagination.

The Jumping Robot video (Boston Dynamics)

Who doesn’t love a jumping, backflipping robot that’s gone viral on YouTube? We love Boston Dynamic’s jumping robot, posted on November 16, 2017. It’s already racked up a whopping 12m views. The robot is positioning the ex-Google brand as the go-to B2B brand for delivering humanoids that can walk (and scare the living hell out of you).

What are 12m views on YouTube worth to your investors and to your brand?

The Gyroscopic Transportation of the Future video

Semendov Dahir Kurmanbievich launched the Futuristic Gyroscopic Transportation and captured our imagination on social media for at least 48 hours. This company racked up 5.4m views on YouTube in just a few days to show the futurist’s concept for a transportation vehicle that can pass above traffic.

“The key to standing out is showing what your impact can be in context – whether that context be your competitors, your industry or other relevant companies,” said Nitzan Tamara, vice president, marketing at market intelligence company SimilarWeb. “The lack of context limits your ability to show what your growth and impact really means. If you want to get noticed and make an impact, show the full picture you operate within.”

Gusto – “The Cross Country Roadtrip”

While it’s way too easy in Silicon Valley to live in your own Northern California hot tub bubble, you’re never going to connect with the rest of the world unless you get on the road and shake hands with the heartland on a ‘listening tour.’ While other tech CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have made promotional tours or roadshows to middle America, in April Gusto chief executive and co-founder Josh Reeves drove a Winnebago from San Francisco to Jacksonville, stopping at 11 cities along the way (more than 3,000 miles).

The trip received local coverage in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Alabama and increased its web traffic by 30%. The business raised $161.1m in funding, backed by investors including Instagram, Stripe, Yelp, Dropbox, and Eventbrite, and is now valued at over $1bn.

Cancun.com – “Seeking a Cancun Experience Officer”

The company set out to find the right candidate to spread the Cancun love and drive traffic to the newly-relaunched Cancun.com. The company behind the stunt (though they tell me it’s more than just a stunt) is TravelPass Group, a travel technology company based in Lehi, Utah that is part owner of Cancun.com.

The posted chief experience officer, or CEO, position pays $10,000 a month for the candidate to live and experience Cancun for 6-months expense free. The CEO will be expected to create content based on their experiences that will be used on Cancun.com. TravelPass and BestDay launched the job search in early November, resulting in more than 350 articles and over 100 broadcast segments, plus 4,000 applications and counting. To apply you have to make a one-minute video.

The best part is the job requirements:

• Sleeping in luxurious beds overlooking the most pristine beaches
• Scaling 3,000-year-old pyramids followed by a swim with a 40,000-pound whale shark
• Sipping an ice-cold beverage before teeing off 200 yards down an ocean fairway
• Mingling with locals and tourists at your VIP table in the hottest clubs
• Coordinating charitable projects with local organizations to support education, health and well-being
• Having the most enviable job on the planet

Interested? There’s still time to apply. Join the more than 4,500 applicants (and counting) from more than 100 countries who have already done so.

Winners will be announced in January.

Screenshop

I love how @screenshopit lets you find the exact designer looks you see people wearing online, plus suggests similar items at all price points! #ScreenShop_Ambassador https://t.co/TXZ23agVoT pic.twitter.com/nA8JBDVbU5

— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) November 7, 2017

Perhaps the best stunt of all is getting one of the biggest brand influencers of all time, Kim Kardashian, to become an early adopter and advisor of your new mobile app. The New York-based app is known as the Shazam for clothing.

“If you don’t have Kim Kardashian’s digits at your fingertips, thanks to the rise of user friendly platforms like FameBit and Tribe, influencer marketing strategy is more easily implementable than ever before,” said Nate Masteron, a marketing expert at Maple Holistics.

Bitcoin (Unnamed)

It wouldn’t be a 2017 tech story unless there was a mention of Bitcoin. Sources tell me there is a Bitcoin stunt in the works as we speak. A crypto-credit-card company is branding a physical token with its logo on it and going down to Wall Street with an army of Task Rabbits to hand them out to Wall Street executives at lunchtime.

According to the PR agency I spoke to, “Wall Street will hate this so much because they have a strong distaste for ICOs.”

The agency will be filming their reaction for a video that is expected to get a huge amount of media pickup. I guess we’ll see, and no, this isn’t part of a PR stunt.

[Read More …]

AdExchanger |

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Tim Sleath, vice president of product management at Exponential. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will be upon us in less than six months is one of a wave… Continue reading »

[Read More …]

AdExchanger |

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Tim Sleath, vice president of product management at Exponential. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will be upon us in less than six months is one of a wave… Continue reading »

[Read More …]